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Tuesday, December 31, 2013

For the most part, my favorite style of action has been
relegated to the direct-to-video market. I’m talking about that genre that was
prevalent in the 1970s and 80s, where a solitary badass, sometimes with a
sidekick, faces down incredible odds in order to get justice and revenge. This
is the genre that gave rise to icons like Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Bruce
Willis, Chuck Norris, Seagal, and Van Damme. While films of this sort are still
alive and well on VOD and DTV, you don’t often see them in theaters, unless
they star Jason Statham. The ticket buying public wants spectacle and CGI and
giant robots roaming the streets. The reigning king of this action underground
is, without a doubt, Scott Adkins. Statham may be more of a draw, but as solid
a lone wolf as he is, Adkins kicks so much more ass. (Statham is, admittedly,
the better overall dramatic actor.)

Gareth Evans’ The Raid: Redemption
pummeled us all about the face and neck, delivering the best martial arts
actioner since we all discovered Ong Bak. After blowing our
minds, the movie left us asking what he was going to do next, and if it was
possible to top the frenetic pace and incredible action. I don’t know if the
sequel, The Raid 2: Berendal will exceed the first—that’s a
tall order—but this new trailer makes it look like he’s going for it with
insane gusto. For the follow up Evans reteamed with star Iko Uwais, and holy
shit, Berendal looks gorgeous, epic, and, most importantly,
crazy violent. And as intense as this footage is, Edwards assures us that all
we see in this trailer is “Act 1 setup.” If this is only the beginning, what
the hell are we in for? I can’t wait to find out.

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is lonely. You’ve seen guys
like him a thousand times on the bus, he never looks ups from his phone, never
interacts with anyone else, and you wonder about the state of his life. Going
through a messy divorce, Theodore writes intimate letters for other people;
from lover to lover, husband to wife, mother to child. Every attempt to feel
something, to connect with another human being, leaves him more and more
isolated, until he’s alone in his apartment losing an argument with a
foul-mouthed character in a videogame.

You learn right away what you've gotten yourself into with
“The Wolf of Wall Street.” Among the first things director Martin Scorsese
shows you are a group of rabid, feral stockbrokers, cranked out of their minds
on cocaine, testosterone, and adrenaline, throwing dwarves at a target; and
Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) doing blow out of a prostitute’s lady parts.
And from there the movie gets crazy.

Saturday, December 21, 2013

Since their inception, movies have loved to use holidays as
a backdrop to the stories they tell. It makes sense. Celebrated by large
swathes of the population, their inclusion lends an air of communality to the
proceedings, a sense that the people on screen are not so different from you
the viewer. Each holiday comes with its own set of easily recognizable tropes,
which go a long way to setting the scene, and many bring with them their own
set of complications and problems to add layers to a narrative. How many times
have we watched a family gathering set on Thanksgiving, where people not
usually in the same room with one another come to blows, real or metaphorical,
when forced into close proximity?

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is a special kind of asshole.
He’ll borrow money from you to pay for your girlfriend’s abortion, your
girlfriend that he knocked up. That’s assuming that you are in fact Justin
Timberlake and you’re dating Carey Mulligan, but you get the idea. He’s also
the protagonist of the Coen Brothers’ latest film, “Inside Llewyn Davis,” and
the greatest feat the “True Grit” filmmakers accomplish is making you
sympathize with this miserable, miserable prick as they delve deep into his
psyche.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

When the “Lord of the Rings” movies dropped, people got
crazy pumped for the release of the extended editions. A year from now, when
the last of Peter Jackson’s three “Hobbit” movies has come and gone, I’m
excited for someone to splice them together, hack out all the superfluous crap,
and finally reveal the single good movie that I know is
hidden in there somewhere. It should be about three hours long. What we’ve seen
thus far, including the latest, “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,” has been
nothing but a disappointment. Overlong, bloated, and tedious, Jackson even did
something that I’d have thought impossible, he made a giant, fire-breathing
dragon voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch boring as shit.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Actors directing movies is a dicey proposition, at best. For
every Ben Affleck or Clint Eastwood, who turn in some of the best work of their
career behind the camera, you get Nicolas Cage directing “Sonny,” or Madonna
forcing “W.E.” upon the world. So when we heard that Ted “Theodore” Logan
himself, Keanu Reeves was going to helm a martial arts actioner, the news left
us puzzled. But you know what, his first directorial effort, “Man of Tai Chi,”
which just hit Blu-ray and DVD, is a damn good time, and delivers everything you
want out of this type of movie.

Sunday, December 8, 2013

More than a report card for AMC’s The WalkingDead, think of this as a one of those progress reports that they sent
home in the middle of the term to let your parents know how you were coming
along. They tracked your development, noted areas where you lagged, and
generally told the world where you needed to pick up the slack. This gives us
an open forum to talk about what the show is doing well thus far in season
four, areas where there is room for improvement, and things we would like to
see the underachieving series accomplish moving into the final eight episodes
of the year.

Sunday, December 1, 2013

The last two weeks on AMC’s The WalkingDead have been spent catching up with that nefarious villain from
season three, the Governor (David Morrissey). They’ve essentially been two
weeks worth of him pretending to change while we build up toward this week’s
mid-season finale, “Too Far Gone,” and the inevitable conflict between the
Governor and the survivors at the prison. When we left him, the Governor was
drawing a bead on Michonne (Danai Gurira) and Hershel (Scott Wilson). How does
this situation evolve, where does that go, and who is going to die? Read on to
find out the answers to all of these and more.